"Come on, just fucking sign for it," Eoran Toriet griped to the slack-jawed cretin hanging in the doorway of the musty hallway. He had a clipboard extended in one hand and a box tucked in the other.

"Hell no," the man replied, "For one thing, you can't talk to me like that. For another, I don't know what you kids are trying to pull out here. Do you know what year it is? Clipboard technology is obsolete. How do I know you aren't some arm of that institute, come to put some... some... contraption in me to get me to power this whole city? My tracking hasn't updated in a week and now you show up here unannounced? With THAT mess?" The recipient indicated the box. "Hell no. HELL no."

Nabet Acina stood on the creaking deck of her porch stoop, watching the last dregs of sunset ooze orange through the black cracks in the Port Haven skyline. Melting into Ossan Holm’s alleyways, baking translucent through hung lines of laundry, dripping through the filthy grates bleak beneath Dawton Street.

Loose, steel toned tendrils of her tightly knotted hair stuck to her face as her adder clear gaze held vigil over their corner, dry herb tinged smoke mingling with sweat in the humid smear of the lower city’s congested evening, the quick tongued voices of her neighborhood’s clans of carrion children clattering between the bricks. Their sharp calls and slide whistle slang folding beneath the crooning old melodies which danced from neighboring windows, the other old women of her block indulging what they could scavenge of their favorite songs from blocky, static-prone radios. All of it stirred into a uniquely familiar waltz of speech and sound in the slamming door of the copper dusk.

As soon as the blistered, cracked egg sun sunk past the buckling roof of Avi Artenin’s laundromat, she knew it was time.